[workaround] automounting does not work for some external devices

Automounting appears to be working a bit better now than in 4.8. However, not all devices automount even though I have mounting turned on for both removable drives and removable media.

I have three external drives, two USB sticks and one hard drive with a USB interface. All three show up on the destop when plugged in, but only one of the three automounts. The two USB sticks are identical except that one has a FAT32 partition and the other has an ext4 partition. Only the one with the ext4 partition automounts. The hard drive does not.

What is making the difference here? Is there anything to look at to find out what is going on?

Re: [workaround] automounting does not work for some external devices

[Answering my own question.]

This appears to be due to a race condition in thunar-volman, which uses GVolumeMonitor. thunar-volman might check for the volume associated with a partition before GVolumeMonitor has information about the volume.

The problem may be rather complex. thunar-volman uses threads, but GVolumeMonitor has a comment about not be aware of some thread stuff.

A workaround is to insert a short delay (1-5 seconds) before thunar-volman starts its real work. Strangely enough, waiting in the innards of thunar-volman does not appear to work.